Audience gaze while appreciating a multipart musical performance

•Eye-tracking study investigated audiences' gazes during a singing duo performance.•Soprano part (i.e., melody part) attracted more visual attention from participants.•Shift of singer's gaze toward co-performer caused joint attention from participants.•Musical part strongly influenced participants' total duration of gaze.•Inter-performer interactions can mediate performer-audience interactions.

Visual information has been observed to be crucial for audience members during musical performances. The present study used an eye tracker to investigate audience members' gazes while appreciating an audiovisual musical ensemble performance, based on evidence of the dominance of musical part in auditory attention when listening to multipart music that contains different melody lines and the joint-attention theory of gaze. We presented singing performances, by a female duo. The main findings were as follows: (1) the melody part (soprano) attracted more visual attention than the accompaniment part (alto) throughout the piece, (2) joint attention emerged when the singers shifted their gazes toward their co-performer, suggesting that inter-performer gazing interactions that play a spotlight role mediated performer-audience visual interaction, and (3) musical part (melody or accompaniment) strongly influenced the total duration of gazes among audiences, while the spotlight effect of gaze was limited to just after the singers' gaze shifts.